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TheAncientGeek comments on Open thread, Jan. 25 - Jan. 31, 2016 - Less Wrong
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I was expressing my reservations about the "New tech isn't making food or housing cheaper fast enough" part.
Of course not everyone has earning potential greater than the cost living. That has always been so. People in this situation subsist on charity (e.g. of their family) or they die.
As to an AI making work force redundant, the question here is what's happening to the demand part. The situation where an AI says "I don't need humans, only my needs matter" is your classic UFAI scenario -- presumably we're not talking about that here. So if the AI can satisfy everyone's material needs (on some scale from basics to luxuries) all by itself, why would people work? And if it's not going to give (meat) people food and shelter, we're back to the "don't need humans" starting point -- or humans will run a parallel economy.
If people own the advanced robots or AIs that are responsible for most production, why would they be impoverished by them? More to the point, why would they want the majority of people who don't own automated factories to be impoverished, since that means they would have no-one to sell to? There's no law of economics saying that ina a wealthy society most people would starve, rather to keep an economy going in anything like its present form, you have to have redistribution. In such a future, tycoons would be pushing for basic income -- it's in their own interests.